Mother Courage

Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation.”

Offill can make you feel that you are riffling through a private diary.

Illustration by Patrick Morgan

There is a remarkable moment in Elena Ferrante’s novel “The Lost Daughter” when the narrator, a middle-aged professor of literature, recalls a scene from her married life. She has just quarrelled with her husband, and wants to run from the house, “forget it and forget everything.” Her two young daughters enter the kitchen. One of them, Bianca, picks up an orange and a knife, hands them to her mother, and asks her to peel the fruit. Make a snake, she says. The girls sit in front of their mother, quietly expectant. “I felt their gazes longing to tame me,” the narrator recalls,

but more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new color, new bodies, new intelligence, a language to possess finally as if it were my true language, and nothing, nothing that seemed to me reconcilable with that domestic space from which they stared at me in expectation. Ah, to make them invisible, to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine.

As often in Ferrante’s pleasingly austere writing, a savage ambivalence hangs over domestic life. Home, family, maternity are actually embraced and ideally escaped.

I thought of Ferrante while reading Jenny Offill’s second novel, “Dept. of Speculation” (Knopf). Some of Ferrante’s interrogations find new expression in Offill’s original book: a young mother and ambitious writer, committed to her daughter and to her writing, tries to find energy and ambition for both; she must claim for writing the authority of necessity that usually attends parenthood. Art-making, unlike the great bourgeois panoply of family life, comes without society’s automatic sanction, and is in some ways hostile to it. Offill’s novel offers a kind of resistance report from within occupied territory.

But that description at once melodramatizes and banalizes “Dept. of Speculation.” It’s a novel that’s wonderfully hard to encapsulate, because it faces in many directions at the same time, and glitters with different emotional colors. If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state. If it brutally tears apart the boredom and frustrations of parenthood, it also solidly inhabits the joys and consolations of having a child. If it laments the work not done, the books not written, the aspirations unfulfilled, it also represents work well done, a book written, the fruit of aspiration. (It has been fifteen years since Offill published her first novel, and one of the teasing metafictional motifs here concerns the narrator’s apparent inability to write a second book.) It is often extremely funny, and often painful; earnestly direct but glancingly ironic, even whimsical.

One reason for this prismatic variousness has to do with the novel’s form. Offill’s narrator, who is nameless, speaks to us in very short, double-spaced paragraph dispatches, as if we were riffling through the pages of her private diary. Many of these paragraphs link with their successors, so that a continuous narrative is not hard to construct; but some are opaque, eccentric, so that we experience deliberate discontinuities and obstructions. Despite the amount of white space between the discrete units of text, the effect is familiar: it is a blocky stream of consciousness—a stream of interruptions, perhaps. The form allows, as sensitive fictional or dramatic monologue usually does, for a managed ratio of randomized coherence. The waywardness and unreliability of the mind’s contents compose a narrative of that mind before our eyes. (Think of Lydia Davis’s short stories, or David Markson’s novel “Wittgenstein’s Mistress”; one of Offill’s influences may have been Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” which has a similar form, though longer paragraphs.)

A picture emerges, in big dots: Offill’s narrator is curious, witty, intellectual, literary, insomniac, and rawly honest both about others and about herself. She is invigorating company, but won’t go out of her way to make herself charming or genial. She is thin-skinned, fatigued, and full of embattled chagrin. In short, she is alive:

Three things no one has ever said about me:

You make it look so easy.

You are very mysterious.

You need to take yourself more seriously.

She lives in New York, falls in love, and gets married. But her plan “was never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” The “art monster” lament is a recurring theme. In a way, it is the novel’s true subject, and a steady source of pain: thwarted aspiration, a sense of life as a slow lapse from high ambition. The narrator was twenty-nine when she finished her first book, and now the head of the department where she teaches creative writing is asking her where the second one is. The writer who can’t write her own book is sent an appropriate comic curse: she accepts a job as a ghostwriter for a wealthy man who wants to write a history of the space program. “It’s going to be a big book,” he tells her. As you might expect, the project goes nowhere; the man is unhelpfully, and comically, invested in “his own aggrieved story of almost but not quite making it into orbit.” Later, he becomes fixated on the Voyager spacecraft and the so-called Golden Record—a gold disk that captured many sounds of the world, an aural time capsule sent into space in 1977 to give aliens a comprehensive idea of human life. The narrator gets her revenge by mocking the rich man as an “almost astronaut,” perhaps uncomfortably aware that she herself could be called an almost writer: her own ghost.

There has been no second book, big or small, partly because life got in the way: marriage, teaching, a child. Offill describes with acuteness the mother’s fierce connection and bemused alienation, as she comes to terms with the novelty of this small, separate being. In the early months, the baby is difficult—a screamer, calmed only by trips to Rite Aid. She’s a “devil baby”; the screaming “like a car alarm was perpetually going off in my head.” The narrator is exhausted, frazzled, intemperate, bored. When someone on the subway intones the phrase “sleeping like a baby,” “I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.” And beyond the usual daily irritation and tedium is a more lingering sadness at the gradual dissolution of old intensities once taken for granted:

My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter’s meter ticked. In the past, we’d talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

I have quoted this single-paragraph entry in full, because one of the strong pleasures of “Dept. of Speculation” lies in the lapidary separateness of each paragraph (even as the paragraphs cumulatively overcome their isolation to make a narrative). The longer entries are like hanging story fragments, reminiscent at times of Lydia Davis’s short texts:

A boy who is pure of heart comes over for dinner. One of the women who is dabbling with being young again brings him. He holds himself stiffly and permits himself only the smallest of smiles at our jokes. He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. “You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones,” someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.

The tone can be oblique and a little mysterious. In what way is the boy “pure of heart”? How, exactly, is the woman who brought him “dabbling with being young again”? (Notice how the phrase itself nicely keeps this woman at arm’s length.) And are those words about imagined and actual accomplishments said mockingly, ruefully, or amusedly?

The narrator’s discovery that her husband is having an affair precipitates a crisis we have somehow been expecting. Rage, shame, revenge at first dominate. But the narrator is always swerving away from customary formulations into the eccentric and the sharply personal. And Offill puts some distance between the rawness of the emotion and the reader by switching her protagonist’s “I” to a blank or even slightly arch third person, “the wife”:

Afterwards, the wife sits on the toilet for a long time because her stomach is twisting. . . . The longer she sits there, the more she notices how dingy and dirty the bathroom is. There is a tangle of hair on the side of the sink, some kind of creeping mildew on the shower curtain. Their towels are no longer white and are fraying along the edges. Her underwear too is dinged nearly gray. The elastic is coming out a little. Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature?

The wife may rage and cry, but at least she has resources, her intelligence and her wit: “At night, they lie in bed holding hands. It is possible if she is stealthy enough that the wife can do this while secretly giving the husband the finger.” She buys a book on coping with adultery, and, predictably, exhausts its bromides. The book instructs her to “say affirmations of some sort each day, about yourself or your marriage.” Since she doesn’t like the ones on offer, she invents her own:

Nerves of Steel

No favors for fuckers

Throughout the book, there have been intimations of mental turmoil, inner struggles. Before she was married, the narrator had travelled to Capri, where she wondered “what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my brain?” Offill’s first novel, “Last Things” (1999), which also told a story of marital abandonment and turmoil, dealt with similar preoccupations. “Last Things” was more conventional, but, like “Dept. of Speculation,” it uses insouciance and indirection to keep pain in check. (Offill achieved this by deploying, as her narrator, a little girl; through her eyes, we watch the antic life and hectic breakup of her parents’ marriage.) In “Dept. of Speculation,” the narrator’s marital anguish intensifies her uneasy relationship with suicide. She visits a student, Lia, in a hospital in Westchester. Lia has “bandaged wrists,” and can’t sleep unless she is drugged. She waits for first light, watching the window. “This is how the wife gets through the nights too, but she doesn’t tell her this.” At the limit of her distress, the narrator seems ominously close to collapse or self-harm: “The wife wants to go to the hospital. But she does not want to have gone to the hospital. If she goes, she might not come back. If she goes, he might use it against her. But when she is alone, the objects around her bristle with intent.” We watch the narrator go to the brink of despair, teeter, and then recover—though it seems unlikely that the mind we have encountered in the course of the novel will be able to find an easy peace. The art monster will only ever be at bay.

“Dept. of Speculation” is all the more powerful because, with its scattered insights and apparently piecemeal form, it at first appears slight. Its depth and intensity make a stealthy purchase on the reader. Unlike the Golden Record’s large global statement, or the almost astronaut’s “big book,” Offill’s brief book eschews obvious grandeur. It does not broadcast its accomplishments for the cosmos but tracks the personal and domestic and local, a harrowed inner space. It concentrates its mass acutely, pressing down with exquisite and painful precision, like a pencil tip on the white of the nail. ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.